Monday, January 21, 2008

First of all, thanks to the nice folks at Lake Claremont Press for sending me a copy of their book From Shock Theater to Svengoolie, all about TV horror movie hosts in Chicago. Cool book! TV horror movie hosts were a big part of my growing up years. Now sadly they all seem to be gone. I guess they served a useful purpose in the 60s and 70s which is now being served by others. The Ghoul in Cleveland used to have to hide behind a goofy fake goatee and sunglasses to say what needed saying. Now we have a lot more freedom in what we can say. Good. I like the world today better than the one I grew up in and I like younger people better than the members of my own generation. Even we ex-punk rock kids are way more uptight than people in their twenties these days -- speaking in sweeping generalities of course (as usual). I'm optimistic for the future. Cautiously.

Basically, the word karma is often misunderstood as being analogous to the concept of fate. There's the idea that you have your karma, the big load of past actions we all carry with us, and these determine our future. To an extent this is true. We cannot escape the effects of the causes we've set in motion. But this point of view is only relevant when we look at time in the usual linear fashion.

Real time in the Buddhist sense is only now. Right now we have complete freedom to act. Our karma sets up certain limitations to this action. Right now my karma has placed me in Torrance, California at a Whole Foods supermarket. Because of this karma I cannot, for example, take any action at my friend Nina's house in Los Feliz immediately. I have to drive there first and it takes time to get there on the perpetually congested So Cal freeways. All of that stuff is karma.

But I am perfectly free at this moment to take any action at all that my karmic circumstances will allow. These words I am writing, for example, are not predetermined. Yet if we were to stand back later on we could trace a line of cause and effect that might make even the words I'm writing at this moment seem to have been predetermined.

But look at your life right now and any notion of predetermination falls to dust.

Still, we need to be careful what we do. There are always effects. Yet we can't be timid. We need to act with a certain degree of boldness. Knowing there will be effects of our action that we cannot be aware of, still we act anyway.

For example, I'm in the midst of writing a new book. In it I am seeking to uproot, rather violently, a lot of the notions of what a Zen teacher ought to be. I'm concerned that the book will make a lot of people upset. It attacks some very fondly held illusions. Yet I believe the overall effect of attacking these illusions will be positive. I believe it's necessary.

Part of me wants to be timid and not push things. But my intuition tells me it's better to push hard because nobody else will do it and it needs to be done.

I think we all struggle with this kind of thing all the time. It's hard to know what's right to do. And so I practice zazen everyday. I believe the balance established in the practice will aid me in seeing what's best to do.

59 comments:

I am seeking to uproot, rather violently, a lot of the notions of what a Zen teacher ought to be. I'm concerned that the book will make a lot of people upset. It attacks some very fondly held illusions. Yet I believe the overall effect of attacking these illusions will be positive. I believe it's necessary.

Hope you know what you're doing. The Internet is full of people who know exactly what's wrong with things and how to set it right if only the "sheeple" would listen.

If anyone's karma compels them to end up being the pusher, and circumstances require a person and that person must be you, then so be it.You have enough sense about you that the nonsense will fall away, with those too serious, respond playfully. Doing needs doing.

A lot of people have been making some pretty good livings off of the rug you're getting ready to pull out from under them from the sounds of it.This is the first you've hinted at what the new book entails. I'm thrilled!

I have no idea what your book covers--but I'd guess it addresses things my eyes have already seen, and I'm sure it puts into straightforward language the vague discomforts I've had with becoming a full fledged 'member' of any zen group, something I've ended up avoiding altogether, do to some kind of irreconcilable diferences--I've found I could only go so far .... I guess I could say while it's been ok to get close to these different groups for extended periods of time, when it came down to it, I 'didn't want to have their baby'

(PLEASE NOBODY GET ME WRONG HERE--NEVER HAS SEX BEEN A PART OF MY ZEN EXPERIENCES--(A PITY, MAYBE), BUT I'VE MORE THAN MADE UP FOR IT WITH SEX IN OTHER AREAS OF MY LIFE)

At any rate, buddhism in America, buddhism in the West, growing, --growing pains a part of it.

Don't have much to say about Karma, but a few horror hosts are still alive and kickin' out there...like Uncle Roy Hoggins of Misouri; and my personal fave Morgus The Magnificent pops up here and there every now and again.

If I could act differently I would act differently. If I couldn't act differently I wouldn't act differently.

(Non)determinism?

Freedom of choice is mostly a feeling caused by forgetting past, future, and present. As long as you make plans you have to lie to yourself every now and then.

The words you write are not pre-determined in a sense that someone wrote them down before. But the language you use, the ideas you have, the urge to utter the words, that all is caused by conditions. Nothing exists outside of conditions, still the effects appear as new, fresh, clear, free.

And more: Different teaching? Nah...

I say: No balance, no merit, Zazen is not practice. :-)

My experience: Real practice does not "need" Zazen and manifests outside of Zazen. Still we should sit Zazen to practice practicing.

I like to not give sitting any sense and I think that you shouldn't even mention the positive effects. It's not about positive effects. I do it even there are all kind of effects and also the lack thereof.

Brad, I agree with what you say and still reject. I doubt I will be upset with your book unless you put 250 juvenile gay and fart jokes in it. Damn, I probably gave you a hint...

I grew up watching hosts of late night horror. My favorite in Kansas City was Crematia Mortem, the ghostess with the mostess! There was also some talking skull on a show called Friday Fright Night. I used to stay up late, watching it with my dad. This is probably why I'm such a fan for the genre.

I was comparing notes on the "Zen master" archetype with a good friend who grew up in Nanjing (PRC).

He said his teacher once reflected on how tricky it can be to lead a mixed group of Japanese, Chinese, and American students because they all have very different expectations of what a "Zen Teacher" should be like.

The point was, it can be really, really beneficial for everybody-- or it can be a real mess.

Dave: did you ever watch The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley? He totally never missed an episode of Count Floyd although Pat Sajak was his favorite television personality of all time, I must say.

Re, karma, sacred cows and getting bitten by the snake of the dharma, I was very sad to read this dharma talk (the part about the girl killed by a pony, which the author relates to karma) from a disciple of Soen Sa Nim, unintentionally ironically titled:Doubt.

In addition to the author's grievous misunderstanding of the grieving process (such as believing that a naive bromide such as "just practice" is some sort of eureka response to witnessing a traumatic event) she goes on to say the poor dead girl's mother wound up a Moonie (i.e., nutjob) because she just couldn't stop thinking about it (I would argue that Soen Sa Nim and his followers played a very negative role in influencing the girl's mother that her grief was unacceptable). Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

I loved some of the letters and koans of Soen Sa Nim, which I read in "Dropping Ashes on the Buddha" and one other book, but come on, this was a guy who claimed to have completed his Zen training by living on crushed pine needles for months and talking to ghosts. What's that about?

Be honest and just admit "I don't know" when asked unanswerable questions such as "why was my innocent daughter killed in a horrible accident?" Here is the unfortunate answer given in the dharma talk retelling of the story:

Soen Sa Nim explained karma to her - the law of cause and effect. He said that in a previous life she had maybe killed this pony or done something mean to it, and so he had come back to her. [...] The little girl killed the pony last time and the pony killed her this time - a poor little 6-year-old girl.

"Soen Sa Nim explained karma to her - the law of cause and effect. He said that in a previous life she had maybe killed this pony or done something mean to it, and so he had come back to her. [...] The little girl killed the pony last time and the pony killed her this time - a poor little 6-year-old girl."

This is BULLSHIT. It's just BULLSHIT. Did I say BULLSHIT?

The term LIFE and REBIRTH in Buddhism does NOT mean PHYSICAL death and it's said in the Pali scriptures thousands of times. But people are DUMB and want to BELIEVE that there is afterlife etc.

No, trying a certain practice for 4 billion years 4 billion times is not meant seriously. Surprised? Metaphor... ya know...

Before people spread crap like some permanent identity that lives trough different bodies people should rather investigate whether there is something like a permanent identity in THIS very own body.

We die and get reborn thousands and thousands of times DURING our physical lifetime, identity recreates itself - that's rebirth. We are attached to this identity and do not allow change. That's suffering, the thirst.

The NON-BUDDHIST concept of physical reincarnation is materialism as its WORST. "I" (the alleged person) don't want to die, so let this fucking idea of myself recreate itself BEYOND this body. Yeah, right... As one of me wasn't enough.

That is not Buddhism. It's sheer stupidity.

People who hear about my interest in Buddhism (the idiot ones) always say: "I don't like vows and ethics and tradition and ritual and meditation, but I also believe I will be reborn." AARGH!

Mainstream BULLSHIT Karma stuff that is build on individual GUILT is just he same shit like misinterpreted Christianity, that someone should feel guilty because he is born. It's obscene to hurt people's feelings with guilt creating statements.

So NO, the child has not been killed because she (who?) killed something before. There is not something like a "personal" essence that transmigrates, that would be the notion of a SOUL and Buddhism REJECTS this thought as you can EASILY check for the absence of a permanent entity in yourself during ONE life.

When the Buddha used "former life" stories he didn't mean that HE (what HE?) lived physically there. It's just generalization and abstractions of his experiences and projections of other peoples experiences. He used those stories to change the context and yet explain the same story. That all was a matter of stylistic choice, cultural habit, and lastly it might have created some craving for immortality for "beginners" - sooner or later they would have found out what he really meant.

Cause and effect means that SOME cause created SOME effect. It's not just or unjust. It just happens. No personal guilt. No reason. The Platform Sutra has nice quotes on this topic by the 6th Patriarch.

There are good people who get good stuff.There are bad people who don't get good stuff.There are good people who don't get good stuff.There are bad people who get good stuff.

That's the way it works. Fate, but without a master plan. Inescapable but unknown. Could the question of justice be wrong to start with?

Modern medical ethics: "First, do no harm." are overlooked by Pharms when they rush questionable drugs to market - the motive being profits. Many can agree, as Buddhists, that this profit motive morally wrong - one should be responsible for the safety of the product sold before gaining from the sale.

Many years ago when I asked Soen Sa Nim the great questions about life and death, reincarnation etc. he just smiled and laughed and said put it all down, keep don't know mind, only go straight, try try try. His teaching was very simple.

When my wife died I made up all kinds of stories about where and why she went away. This seemed to bring some comfort to me and those that loved her. The story about the pony doesn't bother me, because I think I understand a little bit about the context of the situation. Also, whether Soen Sa Nim believed in reincarnation or not is meaningless to me.

"When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two...five, ten...fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction and expansion: 'There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.' Thus I remembered my manifold past lives in their modes and details."

You're free to believe in rebirth or not, according to your own experience and understanding. But it's intellectual fraud to misrepresent what the Pali and Mahayana scriptures teach, for they quite clearly teach literal rebirth.

I just read the story about Polly and this is my opinion. Once you're born it's absolutely certain that you're going to die. That's the karma you get for being born. People think you're guaranteed seventy years. And when someone dies before that, they wonder, why, what's the reason? Well, the reason is that causes and conditions are uncertain. Nobody's guaranteed that they'll wake up tomorrow. That's what stands in need of explanation, why didn't I die during the night? The causes that could lead to death are many and are all around us. So turn the question around. Why is it my great good fortune to live another day? And the reason is that the karma that led to your birth has not yet been exhausted.

Brad,is there a difference between predetermined and preconditioned? These words are partially preconditioned by what you wrote, and partially preconditioned by my being taught English as a child, and ...

Where does it say it's meant literally? Yes, it doesn't say it's NOT meant literally. But couldn't the fact that numbers etc. are beyond imagination be a hint to that it's a figure, symbol, metaphor?

I don't think the Buddha taught as an individual, he was speaking from a point of view of a principle.

At least my (Zen) teachers repeated often that especially Mahayana scriptures are highly symbolic. Or take Dogen, it doesn't mostly make sense at all if you don't know about Buddhist symbolism. If you take ancient commentary like the "Awakening of Faith" or even the Abidharma it's fairly obvious that interpretation of scriptures was common and highly regarded also in those days.

Billions of Boddhisattvas ? Billions of billions of Bodhi trees?

One stylistic choice to bring people beyond their literal imagination is to create images that cannot be comprehended, to destroy literal imagination of states, merit, individuals. So only the "pure" content and the emotional quality remains and can potentially create resonance within the student. No, you don't have to agree with this POV.

Indeed, everyone can believe it's meant literally despite major contradiction to science, logic within the teaching, and common knowledge even 3000 years ago. Then again you can also believe in B-52 bombers coming from spaceships hundreds of million of years ago - like Scientology teaches. And even they mentioned that it is not always meant in a literal sense (you see what public embarrassment can achieve...).

Christianity (rather the Catholic dogma) also suffered tremendously from interpretation issues. Like physical rebirth of Jesus - there were enough alleged heretics who questioned the very sense of these words. But even the pope (!) mentioned is his last book that for example eternity is not meant as a unlimited amount of calendar days, but rather a state of mind.

Sometimes words mean what they mean, sometimes they don't mean what they ordinary mean.

I think I have some scholar stuff on rebirth somewhere, especially how the term was created and how it was used in different ages. I will read it tonight again. Yes it IS still interpretation.

Take it as literal, but I couldn't stand a day considering myself someone enjoying Buddhist teaching if it were for me.

Horror hosts ? Undead & kicking ! And most are moving to the internet in one form or another. Twenty-five year horror host veteran Count Gore DeVol was the first one to hit the net and is still among the best! http://www.countgore.com/

I seem to remember someone posting on this blog getting all down about their luck with relationships, and saying something about relationship difficulty being their karma.

I wanted to draw a clear distinction between what some of us THINK is karma (our ideas about who we are) and actual karma, as Brad described.

Everyone walks around with all kinds of baggage about relationships, work habits, lifestyle habits, and so on. Most of us are so wrapped up in these habits that we don't even realize how free we are.

We just assume we're stuck with them, that we have a fixed identity, with habits we don't like, and that identity doesn't change. But we don't. Christianity addresses this with the idea that we can be "born again" in the Lord, and rid ourselves of habits that we thought were part of our identity, our Self. But we're born again every second of every day if we're living consciously.

Earlier I wrote: Sigh. If only I was better at that "living consciously" thing...

For what it's worth (not much) I'm aware of the irony in the statement quoted above... posting on a blog, dreaming about having a "self" that was better at living consciously than the "self" I think I have now. :-)

It was mainly an attempt to balance the pretentious tone of my earlier post. I should just keep my mouth shut.

Where does it say it's meant literally? Yes, it doesn't say it's NOT meant literally. But couldn't the fact that numbers etc. are beyond imagination be a hint to that it's a figure, symbol, metaphor?

There are several reasons why we should believe that the Tipitaka teachings on rebirth are meant literally.

First, there are numerous stories of death and rebirth in other realms. Off the top of my head, there's a story of a toad which was present when the Buddha taught and got squashed by one of the attendees. The merit of hearing the Buddha's voice was so great, the toad was reborn as a deva, who appeared to the Buddha to thank him. The Pali scriptures are full of stories like this and interpreting them all as metaphors seems forced and artificial.

Second, rebirth was a widely accepted by the different religious teachers in India. If the Buddha did not accept rebirth, he would have rejected it explicitly, as he explicitly rejects a permanent self or atman and rejects determinism, two other widely held views.

Third, belief that one is annihilated at death is among the sixty two wrong views discussed in the Bramajala Sutta. Since this view is explicitly rejected, it's hard to accept that all the teachings on rebirth are metaphorical.

Fourth, rebirth is explicitly taught in the abhidharma and the abhidharma is free of metaphor or other literary stylings.

If you study the Buddhist scriptures seriously, the world view they expound is pretty clear. The universe is of indefinite extent in time and space and within it worlds undergo cycles of ascent and decline, creation and destruction. Within these worlds sentient beings are reborn according to their karma and only some of these beings are visible to humans.

This is not the world view of modern science and I'm not saying you should accept it solely because the Buddhist scriptures say so. But to try to wave away all the places the scriptures are in conflict with science as metaphor is as naive as the view that takes the scriptures entirely literally.

I didn't say all of the Pali scriptures are symbolic, there are historic and narrative parts. But I would say that for example ALL of the Avatamsaka sutra is symbolic.

One of my teachers even sometimes reminded us that all of the Pali scripture could still easily be made up to give some oral teaching greater authority. We don't even know if the Buddha really lived in the way like it is described, same with Jesus. It's well known today that Judaism has done this with their scriptures. But this doesn't invalidate the religious quality of some scripture in any way!

A toad becoming a Deva is NOT symbolic? PLEASE! You probably take classic western fables literally...I am not going to do into detail what "Deva" means for me here, but it's no invisible god-like higher being.

I listened to a "Hindu" (it's not and adequate term, anyway) teacher who is rather in the Bhakti tradition lineages, and he shared my idea idea of rebirth. High realms of consciousness etc., he identified it all right here and now - and I didn't convince him or something. Then that Sufi guy I met a couple of years ago... Anyway, I can even live with the word God in a Christian way these days if you don't objectify/personify HIM (First/Second Commandment).

Right, the Buddha didn't reject rebirth as he used this term for a certain process. He did reject reincarnation of a individual SOUL and these both concepts are not the same.

I think we could stop here. Your approach seems to differ as much as possible.

Reminds me of a lady I met after some retreat. She wanted to know when the next Buddha Maitreya is about to come to save the world. I could only tell her that as she is Maitreya Boddhisattva she should know better.

Reading scriptures and books about Buddhism is sometimes good, practicing and experiencing is always better. I don't believe in personal reincarnation but I do believe part of me was reborn in my children and grandchild.

Yes, I do totally agree. I feel the same with my child. But this differs to what many people think is "reincarnation".

Scriptures are sometimes helpful to sort out what my experience could "mean". I didn't meet a lot of invisible gods, hungry animals, or whatever. But I met a lot of greedy people, anxious people, aggressive people etc.

I actually enjoy reading old scriptures and Dogen's old books even though sometimes I have no idea what they mean. I feel like a football player traded to a new team and I have to learn all the plays, symbols, signs and language. but nobody from 2000 or 1000 years ago is going to tell me who I am today.

Hi BradGot a signed copy of your book "Sit down and Shut Up". I like the dinosaur picture you drew. I noticed you took your email address out. I was going to ask you offblog whether the next time you're in SF you would be interested in talking to our sunday sangha group. Cheers, Arturo

Action happens of itself and only in relationshp ie I catch the ball beacuse you throw it, not in serial duration, which is merely memory. Just simply catching happens. memory then attributes its serial or past present future imaginings over this event. than questions about karma arise.

Since goodness and compassion are of the whole and are intemporal, they will naturally arise when memory is seen as it is, and left as it is. an overlay on what is.

Since the Buddha was never born, he can never be reborn, I only imagine now, an idea of rebith. But for who- buddha suggested there is a path but no-one who walks the path-liberation but none to attain it.